Main Idea Butterflies

Main Idea...Main Idea...Main Idea

No matter what grade level you teach, you have to work on finding the main idea of a passage.

ReadWorks.org is a great site for finding informational passages on lots of topics. The passages are Lexile leveled. You might want to run them through a text complexity analyzer, because all of the passages are not complex, even though they might be of a higher Lexile level.

Click on the image above to visit the site. There's lots of good info.

My third graders read one of the passages from the site, Insects on the Move.

 One of the topics of our State Department's Common Core training this past summer was giving the students the main idea and letting them determine the details that back it up. I gave them the main idea, and they found the details. 

They wrote the main idea I gave them on the body of a butterfly and a detail on each of the spots. Doing this in small groups gave me a lot of insight because I had the chance to actually hear them as they worked through the passage aloud. One of my kiddos said the work was easy because the details were really the main ideas of each paragraph. Don't you love it when they get it?

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